Roy Hodgson began on the path to managing England in the unlikely setting of a
Swedish town. Simon Briggs went to Halmstad to discover how it all
started.

Last Thursday afternoon, a walker following the route of the River Nissan would have stumbled across a burst of activity in this sleepy part of southern Sweden.

Underneath a handsome stand of birch trees, thirty-odd blue-shirted teenagers were playing keepy-uppy on the Halmstad training pitch. Their grizzled coach — one Mats Jingblad — looked on indulgently. “The lads are happy,” he said, “because we just beat BK Hacken, last year’s champions.”

It didn’t take much imagination to visualise the same field as it would have been in 1976. That was the year when an unknown 28-year-old named Roy Hodgson arrived in Halmstad to manage the local team. And when a promising 17-year-old striker called Jingblad was working his way towards the senior team.

“Mr Hodgson used to keep us out here for two-and-a-half, three hours a night,” recalled Jingblad, as his young charges buzzed around him. “Before he came, we would play 11-a-side training matches, or leave the ball behind and go running through the forest. But Roy changed everything.

“He would tell us how we should support each other in the defence, how the midfield players should press up, and the forwards make their runs. Then every few minutes it would be ‘Stop, stop, stop! Look, you can go here, you can go there, you can support this area.’

“It was sometimes ten degrees below freezing and we would be standing around thinking ‘Come on, let us play!’ But when the results started to come in, no one was complaining.”

The story of Hodgson’s first season at Halmstad, a quiet holiday town on the shores of the North Sea, is so unlikely that it has the makings of a movie script. In keeping with the titles of Stieg Larsson’s thrillers, you could call it The Man Who Kicked Swedish Football Into Shape.

Who would have predicted that Hodgson and Halmstads BK would click so well together? He was a Crystal Palace reject who had been assistant manager at such legendary clubs as Maidstone United and Carshalton Athletic. They were semi-professional makeweights in the Allsvenskan, the Swedish first division, who had only escaped relegation on goal difference the previous year.

The combination looked so underwhelming that, in April 1976, 20 different newspapers tipped Hamstads to go down. And yet, by October, the players were celebrating the first national title in the club’s history. Little wonder that Hodgson still describes “the water-into-wine job at Halmstads” as the greatest achievement of his career.

The root of the turnaround lay in Hodgson’s tactical sophistication. When he arrived, Sweden’s national style was to play with a libero, or sweeper, at the back. Hodgson immediately instituted a flat back four, with zonal marking, and a high defensive line to catch opponents offside.

The trophies were soon arriving with such regularity that, over the next decade, every Swedish team from the fourth division to the national side adopted a similar system.

“Roy created a football revolution in Sweden,” says Bengt Sjoholm, a classic bite-your-ankles midfielder who played in Halmstad’s 1979 championship team.

“I don’t believe we would have reached the semi-final of the 1994 World Cup without his influence. He had taught so many of the players in that team: Martin Dahlin, Jonas Thern. Even Freddie Ljungberg, who didn’t train with him, still learned the game the Hodgson way.”

For all the club’s influence, the Orjans Vall stadium has a distinctly dog-eared look about it today. Relegation did befall the team last season, for the first time since 1992, and the average attendance is down from around 10,000 in the glory years to perhaps half that now.

“People just complain these days,” according to Jingblad. “Everyone says ‘You played better before’.” The silver goblets that Hodgson won still occupy a trophy cabinet in the club lounge, but there is no other physical evidence that he was ever here: not so much as a framed picture on the wall.

Only at the local paper, the Hallandsposten, can you find a drawer-full of evocative photographs. A young Hodgson smoking a cigar, with one arm around his wife Sheila. Another shot of him playing ping-pong against his young son Christopher. And the celebrations after the final match of the 1976 season, when he was carried across the pitch on the shoulders of the mob.

But while there may be no bust in the town square, no statue by the gate of the 17th-century castle, Halmstad has not forgotten its adopted son.

Friday’s edition of the Hallandsposten devoted a whole spread to Hodgson’s latest appointment. The headline – “From Halmstad to the witch’s cauldron” — had a note of concern in it: those English fiends won’t be too beastly to our Roy, will they?

“My first year with the paper was the year Roy came,” said Jan-Ove Wikstrom, the author of the article. “I saw him take a team in shambles and create a dynasty. It will be a disadvantage for Sweden that he is managing England in the euros this year. He knows exactly how we work. Other managers might say – ’Oh, it’s just Sweden’ – but he won’t underestimate us in that group game. He’s too smart for that.”

The fanfare surrounding Hodgson’s unveiling last week was a world away from the three-man reception committee that met him at Orjans Vall in 1976, in what was effectively a final interview for the job.

One of them was club captain Hans Selander, a 33-year-old midfielder with more than 30 international caps. Another was Lennart Ljung, the goalkeeper, who remembers Hodgson’s first tactic for winning his audience over. “He knew everyone’s name already, which impressed us from the start.”

All the Swedes knew about Hodgson, meanwhile, was that he had come through the coaching course run by the FA’s progressive technical director Allen Wade. And that he came recommended by Bob Houghton, another Wade protégé, who had arrived in Sweden a couple of years earlier and won the Allvenskan with Malmo in both 1974 and 1975.

“Roy explained his ideas,” says Ljung now, “about how he wanted to teach us a new system, and how he wanted to do it on the training ground, not in the classroom. When we took him on, the first few pre-season games didn’t go too well, but then we won 4-0 against Hannover 96, and they were a strong side.”

Realising the importance of that victory, which bought him some much-needed breathing space, Hodgson wore a Hannover 96 pin in his jacket for the rest of the campaign.

“Then, the players believed in me,” he has said. “It was unheard of for Swedes to beat Germans.” Part of his early success stemmed from the element of surprise. “That first season we were pressing the ball very early, very high on the pitch,” recalls Ljung.

“The other teams didn’t have the tools to deal with it, and we were winning the ball back in their half all the time. A couple of our players had some freedom, like Sigge Johansson on the left wing, who was a very good dribbler. But the rest were all following a specific pattern: Roy drilled us until the movements became automatic.

“The worst was when we played Malmo, where Bob Houghton was manager, because they were trying to do the same thing. Everyone would be squeezed into a narrow band in the middle of the pitch. I remember Brian Clough coming to watch one of those matches before the European Cup Final of 1979.

He said ‘If I threw a hand grenade at the centre-circle, you’d all be dead.’” The two FA graduates were known in Sweden as English Roy and English Bob.

Their didactic style was familiar enough for a local comedian to write a song in which an English manager tells one of his footballers to stand in the corner of the room. The joke being that the room was circular, so the player kept going around and round.

Not everyone was laughing. When Sweden failed to win a match at the 1978 World Cup, their manager Georg ‘Aby’ Ericsson blamed the “English style” for spoiling the team. Matches between Halmstad and the libero-loving traditionalists at nearby Osters IF took on an pointed, personal edge, which is unusual in phlegmatic Sweden.

Ironically, it took a local manager to settle the argument. Sven-Goran Eriksson, a Hodgson-Houghton disciple, won the UEFA Cup with Gothenburg, and the critics finally shut up. “It was very tough for the English trainers,” says Ljung, “because up until 1982, the Swedish Football Federation didn’t approve of their style.”

As an English football evangelist, Hodgson was following in a long tradition of coaches and managers who had fared better overseas than at home. The classic example is Jimmy Hogan, the Lancastrian who inspired Ferenc Puskas and his Magnificent Magyars, yet was sacked by Fulham halfway through the 1934-35 season because “seasoned professionals do not need coaching”.

Still, there is one obvious difference with Hodgson: where his spiritual forebears were never welcomed by the English establishment, he has now been absorbed into it.

In the words of Jingblad, “We in Sweden have helped England with good coaches — first Sven and now Mr Hodgson. But we are only paying you back for what you did for us.”